Who's Controlling Whom?

Walter Berry, M.A. is a dream worker specializing in archetypal projective dreamwork. He leads a weekly dream group in the Los Angeles area that has been featured in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He also conducts private consultations on dreams. When we have nightmares they seem to control us.  Have you ever not wanted to go to sleep because you know that giant black bear or that alien with a deadly cosmic ray will show up again in your dream and chase you down?  It is almost as though the dream is controlling us. As we work with our dreams, the nightmares usually subside,or we recognize the wealth of symbolic reasons they come, and we are no longer subjected to their overwhelmingness. In the middle ground of dreamwork, we open our dreams through various modalities and we become experienced in seeing what the unconscious has to tell us to help us in our everyday lives.  We know after having a dream and recording it, that we can use that symbolic information to guide our lives, to control our path, in a way. On the other end of the spectrum is lucidity.  When lucid in a dream, there is a degree of control that we can exercise within the dream.  We can choose whom to ask questions of,talk to dream figures, and go places and have experiences of our choosing within the vast dreamscape.  We are, to a degree, now in charge of the dream.  Is that good or bad? We will discuss these three levels of control in dreams-Being controlled by the dream, listening to the dream and acting on it, and having a degree of control of the dream content.